gh which true wisdom may come at
last. Democracy is nature-study on a grand scale. The republic is a
huge laboratory of civics, a laboratory in which strange experiments
are performed; but by which, as in other laboratories, wisdom may arise
from experience, and having arisen, may work itself out into virtue.

"The oldest and best-endowed university in the world," Dr. Parkhurst
tells us, "is Life itself. Problems tumble easily apart in the field
that refuse to give up their secret in the study, or even in the
closet. Reality is what educates us, and reality never comes so close
to us, with all its powers of discipline, as when we encounter it in
action. In books we find Truth in black and white; but in the rush of
events we see Truth at work. It is only when Truth is busy and we are
ourselves mixed up in its activities that we learn to know of how much
we are capable, or even the power by which these capabilities can be
made over into effect."

Mr. Wilbur F. Jackman has well said: "Children always start with
imitation, and very few people ever get beyond it. The true moral act,
however, is one performed in accordance with a known law that is just
as natural as the law which determines which way a stone shall fall.
The individual becomes moral in the highest sense when he chooses to
obey this law by acting in accordance with it." Conventionality is not
morality, and may co-exist with vice as well as with virtue. Obedience
has little permanence unless it be intelligent obedience.

It is, of course, true that wrong information may lead sometimes to
right action, as falsehood may secure obedience to a natural law which
would otherwise have been violated. But in the long run men and
nations pay dearly for every illusion they cherish. For every sick man
healed at Denver or Lourdes, ten well men may be made sick. Faith cure
and patent medicines feed on the same victim. For every Schlatter who
is worshiped as a saint, some equally harmless lunatic will be stoned
as a witch. This scientific age is beset by the non-science which its
altruism has made safe. The development of the common sense of the
people has given security to a vast horde of follies, which would be
destroyed in the unchecked competition of life. It is the soundness of
our age which has made what we call its decadence possible. It is the
undercurrent of science which has given security to human life, a
security which obtains for fools as well a